RightWay2BGreen

PUT UP OR SHUT UP

This is a reprint of an article I wrote about 15 years ago and published in a number of media. No one has yet taken me up on the challenge

TIME FOR A SHOWDOWN ON THE WESTERN RANGE

Some arguments can’t be resolved with words. They have to be settled mano a mano out in the real world where success and failure are a matter of results not rhetoric. You can argue forever about whose horse is the fastest, but the only way to find out is to race them. One place where we need a good horse race these days is in the interminable argument over whether or not to remove grazing from the public rangelands of the American West.

Most of you, I’m sure, are wondering what’s to argue about. Everyone knows what’s wrong with those lands—that they’re overgrazed, overtrampled, and polluted with cow splats. And everybody knows who’s to blame—all those filthy-rich welfare ranchers and their ravenous cows and sheep. Some scientists claim that livestock have wreaked more havoc on the West than all bulldozers and chainsaws combined. Some even say that the damage they have created is so severe it may never heal.

So, what’s the hold up? The way to save the range is getimoff and lockitup, right! Remove the cows and the ranchers and everything will return to nature. Well, if that’s what you believe, I’ve got a challenge for you.

What would you do if I offered to bet you that, if we took two identical pieces of Western rangeland side by side, and you used the getimoff and lockemup approach on your side, and I put cows on my side, lots of em, and left them there until they had eaten just about everything, and then I took them off until the plants grew back and did that over and over again, that my side would be healthier than yours?

Would you break your fingers trying to get me to “shake on it” before I changed my mind? Would you put your life savings on the line? Would you tell all your friends that you had found a sucker so dumb that you were already spending your winnings?

Before you start counting, there’s a couple of things I ought to tell you.

First, I ought to tell you that there has been a change in the way some ranchers manage their animals. Some ranchers have begun emulating the way natural grazers graze, concentrating their animals by means of temporary fences, herders, or tasty enticements and moving them about the land in the manner of a herd of bison pursued by wolves or Native American hunters and drawn by the lure of fresh pasture and the next waterhole. Grazing in this way, natural ungulates don’t overgraze, but they do mow, de-thatch, reseed, and fertilize, performing the same functions you and I perform to keep our own grasslands, our yards, green and healthy.

These methods have been used to restore grasslands to health on lands damaged by mining, off road vehicle damage, roadbuilding, and catastrophic wildfire. They have been used to cover piles of toxic mine waste with green and growing plants. Last but not least, livestock have even been used to revegetate land damaged by overgrazing.

Anti-grazing activists dismiss these successes as self-serving rancher hogwash, but when I first made my challenge four years ago in a magazine that was distributed nationally (Range), no one took me up on it. Because that magazine was read mostly by ranchers, I made the offer again, more recently, in the newsletter of the Arizona chapter of the Sierra Club, one of the groups that has been most critical of grazing. Again, no takers. This past December (2000) I made the challenge again at The First National Conference on Grazing Lands. Still no takers.

The reason I’m doing this is not to whitewash the damage grazing has done and is still doing. It is to make a point. What better way to let you, the American Public, know that ranching (livestock grazing) can be the most effective tool we have to restore health to certain ecosystems of the West than by having the opposition back down from a challenge like this. Or to have them take the challenge and lose out in the open for all to see.

I say it’s the most effective tool because, in most of the successes I listed above, the getimoff and lockitup alternative had been tried and failed. In other words the showdown has already happened, and they lost.